Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  * * *

  SO WHAT do Caryl Flinn, author of Brass Diva, and Brian Kellow, author of Ethel Merman, have to contribute to the Merman saga? Very different things, it turns out. Professor Flinn is an academic, at the University of Arizona, and author of The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. This perhaps accounts for the flaws in her otherwise careful and intelligent book. One of them stems from the negative side of her admirably zealous research: too much detail. Do you want to know, for instance, exactly where young Ethel lived in Astoria? “In her first autobiography, she gives 2903 1st Avenue as the place where she grew up; in her second, 31st Avenue. Her biographer Bob Thomas claimed it was 359 Fourth Avenue. Saved mail to the family postmarked in November 1931 was received at both 2908 31st Avenue and 3056 30th Street.” Thank you, Professor.

  In the same spirit, Flinn provides extended plot summaries of a series of insignificant and forgotten one- and two-reelers that Merman made for Paramount in the early 1930s. This is material previously untouched by critical hands, and for the sake of grasping Merman’s early performance style I’d love to sample throwaways like Her Future, Ireno, and Song Shopping. But reading seven tight pages about them is just too much of a good thing.

  And then there’s Flinn’s insistence on placing Merman sociologically. Issues of feminism, class, and culture are constantly put forward: “Ethel was always a lightning rod that reflected changes in the social landscape, and in her (and responses to her), we see evolving attitudes toward family, sex, celebrity, class, and age.” Sorry, but that’s not what I saw. It’s not that the professor plays down Merman the phenomenal performer, it’s that she plays up the idea of finding significance where only achievement matters.

  Brian Kellow’s background lies in music and performance (he’s the features editor of Opera News), and therefore he’s more focused on Merman’s actual singing and stage smarts. His fluent book, then, is more useful on the musician, less perceptive about the life.

  * * *

  AND WHAT WAS THE LIFE? Ethel Agnes Zimmermann was born on January 16, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1911, or 1912 (the last of which, if true, would have seen her graduating from high school at twelve). Her parents—Pop’s background was German, Mom’s Scottish—were hardworking, frugal, serious, churchgoing, and musical. Baby Ethel’s voice was huge from the start, and by the time she was five she was making public appearances, not only in church choirs but in Pop’s Masonic lodge, pageants, the Women’s Republican Club. (One of her boasts was that she never took a singing lesson in her life.) Cautious and pragmatic like her parents, she chose to take commercial courses in high school in case singing didn’t pan out, which is how she came to be working as a stenographer, first at Boyce-ite (antifreeze), then at BKVacuum Booster Brake Company (power brakes). Meanwhile, she was doing nighttime radio shows. By 1927 she has her photo on sheet-music covers; by 1928 she’s singing at the Democratic convention that nominated FDR for governor and performing in tony nightclubs. By 1930 she’s playing the Palace.

  It was at the Brooklyn Paramount that she was approached by a top Broadway producer, Vinton Freedley, who was looking for the second female lead for the new Gershwin show, Girl Crazy. (Ginger Rogers was the ingénue.) He was knocked out by her, and hurried her to George and Ira’s apartment for an audition. They were knocked out, too, and in a famous exchange recounted over and over again (usually by her), George said, “Miss Merman, if there’s anything about these songs you’d like to change, I’d be happy to do so.” “They’ll do very nicely,” she replied.

  “These songs” included “Sam and Delilah,” “Boy! What Love Has Done to Me!” and, of course, “I Got Rhythm,” which, when she blasted it out at the end of act one, made Broadway history. No one had ever heard a sound like hers, or seen such confidence in someone so young. But then Merman never suffered from stage fright. “What’s there to worry about? I know my lines.”

  From then on it was triumph after triumph, including five shows written for her by Cole Porter—most famously, Anything Goes (1934). Then there was Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946), for 1,147 performances, and eventually Gypsy (1959), maybe the greatest of all musicals and the greatest of all star performances. And consider the list of American standards written with Ethel’s voice in mind: “Eadie Was a Lady,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “Ridin’ High,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (and all her other numbers from Annie), “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Only Fred Astaire was as much in demand by the great American songwriters.

  How did she sing? The word usually applied to her is “belter,” but it was more complicated than that—more than just a huge voice trumpeting every syllable to the back of the house. Kellow refers to her vocal production being extraordinarily even throughout her range; to her “naturally forward placement, superb command of breath support,” and the solid physique that “helped her to sing like an operatic tenor; the sound moved up through her chest and resonated in her head, with true tenorlike ping on the high notes.” Indeed, the only artist she ever reminded me of was an opera singer—but not a tenor. In 1952 the greatest of Wagnerian sopranos, Kirsten Flagstad, gave her final performances at the Met, in Gluck’s Alceste. Portly, in simple powder-blue robes, she planted herself downstage center, opened her mouth, and out came an immense and beautiful column of sound. No acting, no effort—just splendor. That was Merman, given the differences between Alceste and, say, Panama Hattie.

  Merman always knew exactly what worked for her, and although she listened carefully to directors, she made the important decisions for herself—in particular, about what songs suited her. She didn’t go in for motivation or analysis. What was there to analyze? When Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim added “Rose’s Turn” to Gypsy, Sondheim tried explaining it to her. She listened politely, then interrupted him. “There was just one thing she wanted to know,” Kellow reports. “Did ‘Mmmmmm-mmm-Mama’ come in on an upbeat or a downbeat?”

  She was a consummate professional—always on time, never missing a show, never allowing her boozing to impinge on her work, never compromising the level of her performance—and she expected the same professionalism from her colleagues and lowered the boom if they disappointed: “This is a job like any other job you go to. It’s like being a plumber or carpenter or anything else. You come to the theater and you come to work.”

  She was also efficient and methodical in private life. Proud of her stenographic experience, she typed her own letters and did her own accounts. And nobody took advantage of her. The morning after Annie opened, says Kellow, “Ethel didn’t have time to look over the notices carefully, for she was on the telephone with the manager of their local grocery store, demanding to know why she’d been charged so much for a can of peaches that hadn’t been delivered the day before.”

  * * *

  THE ONE AREA in which she was vulnerable was her romantic life. Not a very pretty girl, she was robustly sexy onstage rather than erotic or seductive; she was the quintessential good egg, someone you rooted for rather than rooted after. Her first marriage lasted only a few weeks. Her second, to Bob Levitt, was more serious. He was the promotion director for the New York Journal-American, well-read and sophisticated. They had two children and for a while got along well, but eventually proved incompatible. As Ethel, with her innate delicacy, put it, “Levitt would fuck a snake!” Yet decades after their divorce, long after he’d died, she had his body exhumed and cremated and kept his ashes in an urn in her bedroom.

  Number three was Robert Six, founder and head of Continental Airways, headquartered in Denver. Retiring (for the moment) from the stage, Ethel moved to Colorado and set herself up as a traditional wife and mother—gardening, cooking, working for the Boy Scouts. Unfortunately, Six was another womanizer, and violently abusive to Ethel’s kids and to her parents. Goodbye, Denver.

  Number four was the notorious and momentary misma
tch with Ernest Borgnine.

  Not a very happy record. And, given her fraught relationship with her son, Bob Jr. (her daughter, Ethel Jr., had died a drug-related death), there was not much left in life for Ethel. She went on making appearances—in concerts, on TV—but her kind of Broadway vehicle was a thing of the past. She lived alone in hotel suites, finally at the Surrey on East Seventy-Sixth Street, where she had the stove removed, using only a small toaster oven in which, Caryl Flinn reports, she would reheat Chinese takeout or cook chicken hot dogs. All over the apartment she displayed her needlepoint work “alongside her beloved Raggedy Anns and Muppet friends.” In early 1984 she succumbed to an inoperable brain tumor. Before her death, her mental powers had deteriorated, and her fabulous energy and drive were gone.

  Twenty-odd years have now passed and there’s still no one like her. But what could today’s theater do with her if she were to be reborn? Ethel Merman in Phantom of the Opera or Mamma Mia? Yet she remains an icon. Her too-few records are still in demand and often thrilling, and from the movie of one of her stage hits, Call Me Madam, plus a 1954 telecast of Anything Goes, co-starring Bert Lahr and Frank Sinatra, we get a sense of her extraordinary talent as a performer. Alas, from these two biographies what we get is a sense of the otherwise mostly empty life she apparently lived.

  The New York Observer

  NOVEMBER 27, 2007

  The Wit

  DOROTHY PARKER

  WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE TODAY of this famous woman who, beginning almost a century ago, has fascinated generations with her wit, flair, talent, and near-genius for self-destruction? For some, what registers most strongly is her central role in the legend of the Algonquin Round Table, with its campiness of wisecracks, quips, and put-downs—a part of her life she would come to repudiate. For others, it’s the descent into alcoholism, and the sad final years holed up in Manhattan’s Volney hotel. Pick your myth.

  As for her writing, it has evoked ridiculous exaggeration from her votaries, both her contemporaries and her biographers. Vincent Sheean: “Among contemporary artists, I would put her next to Hemingway and Bill Faulkner. She wasn’t Shakespeare, but what she was, was true.” John Keats in his biography of her, You Might as Well Live (1970): “She wrote poetry that was at least as good as the best of Millay and Housman. She wrote some stories that are easily as good as some of O’Hara and Hemingway.” This is praise that manages to be inflated and qualified at the same time.

  And here is Regina Barreca, a professor of English literature and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, in her introduction to the Penguin edition of the Complete Stories: “If Parker’s work can be dismissed as narrow and easy, then so can the work of Austen, Eliot, and Woolf.” Well, no. Exaggerated claims don’t strengthen the case for Parker’s literary accomplishments. As is inevitably the case with criticism grounded in agenda, they diminish it. But this doesn’t mean that her work is without value or interest.

  Certainly she struck a chord with the public. From the start, her voice spoke to a wide range of readers. Her generally sardonic, often angry, occasionally brutal view of men and women—of love and marriage, of cauterized despair—triggered recognition and perhaps even strengthened resolve. She told the truth as she perceived it, while using her wit and humor to hold at arm’s length the feelings that her personal experiences had unleashed in her. An uncanny modern descendant is Nora Ephron in her novel Heartburn, which re-imagines her ugly and painful breakup with Carl Bernstein as a barbed comedy.

  Dorothy Parker, photographed by Edward Steichen

  In 1915, Parker, aged twenty-two, went to work at Vogue (for ten dollars a week), writing captions, proofreading, fact-checking, et cetera, and after a while moved over to the very young Vanity Fair; her first poem to be published had recently appeared there. She happily functioned as a kind of scribe-of-all-work until three years later when she was chosen to replace the departing P. G. Wodehouse as the magazine’s drama critic. She was not only the youngest by far of New York’s theater critics, she was the only female one.

  It was at the magazine that she met the lovable and sympathetic Robert Benchley, who would become the closest friend of her life, as well as Robert Sherwood, long before his four Pulitzer Prizes (three for drama, one for biography). They became a threesome, and started eating lunch together at the nearby Algonquin Hotel because it was affordable and the food was okay. At about the same time, another threesome drifted in, graduates of Stars and Stripes, the overseas Army’s weekly newspaper. They were Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, and Franklin Pierce Adams, who as “F.P.A.” was the most influential newspaper columnist of the day. Soon Adams was quoting Parker’s Vanity Fair verses and, even more effectively, her bon mots. Quickly “Dorothy Parker” was a celebrity.

  It didn’t hurt that she was very pretty, very sexy, and had a somewhat checkered personal life. She had married a good-looking, not very interesting (to others) young WASP businessman named Edwin Parker—she liked to say she did it in order to legitimately shed her maiden name of Rothschild (no, not the Rothschilds). He went into the Army in 1917, and she followed him around Army bases in the States, but when he came back from overseas, it was over; apart from anything else, he had become seriously addicted to morphine.

  Many amours followed, all of them disastrous and all of them feeding her eternal presentation of herself in her prose and poetry as wounded, heartsick, embittered, soul-weary. Along the way, she had a legal but frightening abortion (she had put it off too long), the father being the charming, womanizing Charles MacArthur, who would go on to co-write The Front Page and marry Helen Hayes. Parker was crazy about him; his interest waned. The gossip was that when he contributed thirty dollars toward the abortion, she remarked that it was like Judas making a refund.

  * * *

  IN 1920 Vanity Fair fired her at the insistence of several important Broadway producers whom her caustic reviews had managed to offend. (Benchley immediately resigned in solidarity with her; Sherwood had already been fired.) Another literary magazine, Ainslee’s, with a far larger readership, took her up and gave her a free hand, and she went on laying waste to the tidal wave of meretricious plays and musicals and revues that opened every year, sometimes ten a week; one Christmas night there were eight premieres. Yet—always just, if not always kind—she recognized and saluted real achievement when she actually came upon it.

  Meanwhile, her verses and stories were appearing profusely and everywhere: not only in upscale places like Vanity Fair (which was happier to publish her than employ her), The Smart Set, and The American Mercury, but also in the popular Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Life (when it was still a comic magazine), and—starting with its second issue, early in February 1925—her old pal Harold Ross’s new venture, The New Yorker, with which she would have an extended on-again, off-again love affair.

  At first, the stories were essentially sketches fed by her perfect ear for foolish, self-absorbed conversation and her scorn for middle-class hypocrisies. They appealed to the same cast of mind that was responding so clamorously to Sinclair Lewis’s puncturings, in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), of what H. L. Mencken called the “booboisie.” As time passed, though, her intentions grew more serious, culminating in her longest and best-known story, “Big Blonde,” which won the 1929 O. Henry Award (Faulkner, Cheever, Updike, Carver, Oates, and Munro were among later winners).

  “Big Blonde” reveals the desperate life of a fading party girl who’s run out of steam and tries, and fails, to kill herself. It’s convincing in its verisimilitude and deployment of pathos, but finally it comes across as a masterly performance rather than a reverberant vision of life. (Compare it to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.) It’s also Parker dealing with her own failed suicide attempts—slashed wrists, Veronal (Big Blonde’s drug of choice). Suicide was a constant reality for her. The novel she began was to be called Sonnets in Suicide. One of her most famous poems, “Résumé,” summed things up:

  Razors
pain you;

  Rivers are damp;

  Acids stain you;

  And drugs cause cramp.

  Guns aren’t lawful;

  Nooses give;

  Gas smells awful;

  You might as well live.

  Death and suicide were never far from her thoughts—she titled her collections Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, Death and Taxes, and Not So Deep as a Well, the first of them a major best seller in 1926, confirming her fame.

  Was her poetry just rhyming badinage dressed up as trenchant, plaintive ruminations on love, loss, and death? Her subjects are serious, but her cleverness undercuts them: There’s almost always a last line, a sardonic zinger, to signal that even if she does care, the more fool she. Even her most famous couplet—“Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses”—bandages a wound, although plenty of men made passes.

  She was clear about her versifying. “There is poetry and there is not,” she once wrote in The New Yorker, and she knew hers was not. She thought her stories were superior to her poems (she was right), but that wasn’t good enough for her. She never managed to write The Novel (as at that time every writer dreamed of doing). Did Hemingway like her work? Did he like her? (He didn’t, but she didn’t know it. As she was dying, Lillian Hellman had to assure her that he did.) Nor did she have much respect for what she and her second husband, the handsome, possibly gay actor and writer Alan Campbell, whom she married twice, did in Hollywood. (She liked referring to him publicly as “the wickedest woman in Paris.”) They worked hard at their assignments and raked in the chips, and she was twice nominated for an Oscar (A Star Is Born, 1937; Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, 1947), but her view of film writing never changed from her verdict about it when she was first venturing out to California: “Why, I could do that with one hand tied behind me and the other on Irving Thalberg’s pulse.”